


To Find a Way in the Dark

by strawbebbyy



Category: Persona 5
Genre: M/M, Pining, mentions of abuse, rated for language and for the discussion of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 19:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21287234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawbebbyy/pseuds/strawbebbyy
Summary: There’s something deep in Mishima’s heart that feels like it can settle a little now, knowing he’s not alone. As if just finding someone who really does understand what he’s experienced and how he feels has brought a little bit of peace to the parts of him that Kamoshida damaged.He doesn’t tell Ryuji any of that, though.--Ryuji and Mishima take a break from training and talk about putting the pieces back together.
Relationships: Mishima Yuuki/Sakamoto Ryuji
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	To Find a Way in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my Tumblr!
> 
> Mishima is tough and he doesn't get enough credit for that.

Mishima sits in the soft grass behind the school gym, idly plucking up individual blades. He’d collapsed here after he and Ryuji had finished running laps around area. He’d been out of breath, eagerly gulping down water from the bottle he’d brought, but Ryuji had seemed much better off - he’s standing nearby, not nearly as winded as Mishima still feels, even after taking some time to catch his breath. He’s been training with Ryuji for a few weeks now, trying to get back into shape after taking a few months off in the aftermath of the Kamoshida thing. It makes something bitter curl in his gut, to see he’s still so easily winded. He wasn’t really the most fit guy, even when he was on the volleyball team, and the time off hadn’t helped that. He scowls, angry that he’s progressing so slowly.

“Dude, why the face?” Ryuji laughs lightly, nudging him a bit with the toe of his shoe.

“I’m not making a face!”

That makes the blonde snicker more. “You totally are.”

“I just feel like I’m not making much progress. I can still barely keep up with you, and by the end of our run I’m dead on my feet.”

“You’re bein’ too hard on yourself.”

“I know.”

“If you know, then stop!”

Mishima frowns a little. It’s not that easy. Just because he knows he’s expecting too much of himself in just a few weeks, it doesn’t mean he can just stop wanting to improve faster. He wipes some sweat from his brow, watching the puffy white clouds drift peacefully through the pale blue sky. It would be a nice day if it wasn’t the middle of summer and the middle of a heat wave. They should’ve gone to Protein Lover’s today, at least there they’ve got air conditioning and showers.

“Would you ever want to do track again?”

“What, like join the track team? Nah.”

“What if you had the chance to join a different track team at a different school… like at college or something. Wouldn’t you want to?”

Ryuji gets very quiet, staring at his shoes as if they have all the answers.

“No, I don’t think so.” He finally says after a long moment.

“Oh.” Mishima fidgets with the hem of his shirt. “Because of Kamoshida?”

Ryuji sighs heavily, leaning against the brick wall of the gym. “If you’d asked me a year ago, I might’ve said yes.” His foot taps nervously on the ground. “But now I’m not so sure. For a while I  _ did  _ want to go back - I was pissed at Kamoshida, but I still wanted the team to be back together. I still wanted to run. Kamoshida might’ve stopped me from actually doing track, but he didn’t make me stop lovin’ the sport, y’know?”

“What changed? Why don’t you want to go back now?”

“It’s gonna sound stupid.”

“No it won’t.”

“I met Akira. And then I started talkin’ to Ann, and then the rest of the Phantom Thieves. Before I knew it I had a whole group of friends. And I didn’t even think about goin’ back to the track team anymore.” He flops into a sitting position in the grass, stretching his legs out in front of him.

“You found a new place you fit in.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s really what it comes down to, huh? It bothers me a little that I won’t be getting a track scholarship or anything, but I was working towards that mostly just to help out my mom. Maybe one day when I’m older I’ll wanna get back into track, but right now? Nah.” Then he elbows Mishima in the side lightly. “Don’t ask me so many hard questions, dude.”

“Well, if one day you do get back into it, I bet you’d make a good coach.”

Ryuji laughs a little, twisting the lid of his water bottle. “What? No way, man.”

“Hey, you don’t have to laugh! I was being serious! You’ve basically been coaching me, haven’t you?”

“I’ve just been training with you, not  _ coaching _ . It’s not the same.” Ryuji goes quiet for a while, eyes focused on the sun beating down, harsh and unforgiving, on the grass. He looks like he’s thinking hard about something, not that Mishima could even hazard a guess as to what he could be so preoccupied by. “What about you? Would you wanna join another volleyball team?”

“I don’t know.” Mishima admits, even though he wishes he could give an actual answer. “Is that bad?”

“Nah. It’s complicated, I get it.”

Since the truth about Kamoshida came out, there have been a lot of people who’ve told Mishima that they understand what he’s been through, or they know how he must feel. People who weren’t ever involved in the situation - who had the luxury of being bystanders. People who could never understand, not really. He knows they only have been trying to comfort him, to be friendly, to try in some way to take some of the weight off his shoulders, but after so many people have said the same things to you it starts to get a little bit irritating.

The only people who could ever understand are the other members of the volleyball team - who Mishima was never especially close with - and the members of the track team. So when Ryuji says he gets it, Mishima believes him. There’s something deep in Mishima’s heart that feels like it can settle a little now, knowing he’s not alone. As if just finding someone who really does understand what he’s experienced and how he feels has brought a little bit of peace to the parts of him that Kamoshida damaged.

He doesn’t tell Ryuji any of that, though.

“I don’t hate volleyball.” He pulls at a loose thread on his pants. “In fact, I still really like it. But it’s hard to separate the sport from the abuse.” He hasn’t admitted that to anyone before - not his parents, or the school counselor, or any of his former teammates. “It’s tough to enjoy playing when the whole time I can only think about the way Kamoshida treated the team. I  _ want  _ to play, but I don’t feel like I can.”

Beside him, Ryuji nods solemnly.

“There’s no rush, you know. I mean, the shit you went through… getting over that can take a while. Sorting out how you feel about the abuse and Kamoshida compared to how you feel about the sport, well, it takes as long as it takes, right? There’s nobody sayin’ you have to have it all figured out right now.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He sounds dejected, and that makes Ryuji frown.

“Earlier, when I said Kamoshida didn’t make me hate track… that wasn’t totally true. I hated Kamoshida, and I hated goin’ to practice after he took over as our coach. I mean, of course I hated it, practices with Kamoshida were a freakin’ nightmare. I hated the way he treated us, but I still loved the sport on it’s own.

“Somewhere along the lines, though, my hatred for him turned into dislike for the whole sport. I still worked hard at practice and at meets, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was like half of me still loved track and half of me had just given up on it completely - like I still enjoyed it in theory, but in reality I just didn’t care as much as I used to. Part of me assumed that Kamoshida wouldn’t be coach forever, and whenever someone new took over things would improve and my old enthusiasm would come back, you know? I just had to stick it out until then. But then the team got broken up and I really missed it, even though I had kinda hated it. I think, back then, if you’d given me a chance, I would have gone back to bein’ coached by Kamoshida just so I could be on the team again.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. You hated being on the team, but you would have gone back to being abused if it meant you could be on the team again?”

“I know. Stupid, right? When I was on the team, I hated Kamoshida and I hated being on the team because of him. As soon as the team broke up, though, and I wasn’t dealing with Kamoshida spoiling the whole sport for me, I realized I still really did love running. Plus, in one go all my friends had turned their backs on me. That was hard. Then it didn’t even seem like it mattered that Kamoshida treated us like shit, it just mattered that my friends hated me and I couldn’t run anymore. I've got other friends now - better friends. I don't miss the team. But I still miss running. I mean, I still get to run - doin’ Phantom Thief work and trainin’ with you and Akira. It’s rewarding, but it’s still not really the same as it was when I was goin’ to track meets."

“I think I get it. The way he treated the volleyball team was terrible, and I’m glad he’s gone. But I do miss volleyball a lot.”

Silence descends upon them. Mishima feels like he might squirm right out of his skin, but he isn’t quite sure why he feels so weird sitting in the silence with Ryuji.

“How did you do it?” He asks, quiet words swallowed up by the ambiance of a summer afternoon - bird songs and the distant sounds of other students who haven’t gone home yet. “How did you deal with everything that happened? The abuse, the team all blaming you, the injury… I can’t imagine what it must have been like.”

“What’re you talkin’ about? You’re in the same boat as me, dude.” Ryuji smiles brightly at him despite the sensitive topic. Huh, that’s a funny feeling in Mishima’s stomach - a fluttery, nervous sort of feeling.

“It’s not the same,” Mishima parrots back Ryuji’s own words from earlier. “The whole team didn’t turn on me. I didn’t get my leg broken.”

“You can’t go around comparing abuse, dude. We were both treated like shit by a no good adult, you can’t just decide one of us had it worse. Neither of us should have had to go through what we did, end of story.”

That was uncharacteristically wise for Ryuji, but Mishima frowns thinking about why he knows so much about this sort of thing. He must have learned it from firsthand experience, between his own abuse and the things his friends have been through - friends like the rest of the Phantom Thieves. Mishima doesn’t know exactly who else is in the group, but he’s talked to Akira enough to know most of them have come from some kind of unsavory situation.

“I couldn’t even stand up to Kamoshida, I don’t know how I would’ve come back from something like what he did to you.”

Ryuji shrugs. “It kinda seemed like the end of the world at the time, but it wasn’t. I moved on from the team, my leg healed, and life went on, you know?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, even though he doesn’t feel like Ryuji really answered his question. Ryuji’s gotta be one of the most determined people Mishima’s ever met. He doesn’t let anything keep him down. Abuse, an injury that ended his track career, the whole school deciding he’s just a troublemaker… none of that stopped him. He’s stronger than Mishima could ever imagine being. More than once since they started training together, Mishima has seen him stop in the middle a run, hand clutching his right leg and face twisted up in pain, only to take a deep breath and finish the exercise. He says it hurts less the more he trains, but Mishima is sure that if their roles were reversed, he’d have given up long before now.

A little voice whispers that Mishima has done his fair share of getting back up after life knocked him on his ass. He’s strong, too, he reminds himself. Each day, he’s learning more and more how to rebuild himself from the pieces left behind by the shit he’s been through. It’s a process. He’s getting there.

He needs to be more patient with himself.

“You look like you’re thinkin’ hard about somethin’ over there.”

“Huh?” He’s torn from his thoughts abruptly. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Can’t relate.” Mirth dances in Ryuji’s brown eyes, and Mishima can’t help but grin. That fluttery feeling is back, accompanied this time by his heard pounding as if it’s tap dancing against his sternum. He stares at his hands where they’re fidgeting with his shoelaces, as if the motion of his fingers twirling the laces is the most interesting thing he’s seen all day.

“Dude, you alright? Did you get too much sun? You’re acting kind of funny and you’re lookin’ a little red.”

“Y-yeah, I’m fine. I think maybe I did get too much sun, I’m feeling kind of off.” Yes, his cheeks are red and warm because he got a sunburn. That’s it for sure.

He isn’t sure he’s convinced himself  _ or  _ Ryuji.

“You should get home, then. Want me to walk you to the station?”

“No, thank you.” He gets up, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

“Alright. Text me when you get home, alright? Kinda worried about you, since you’re not feeling well.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I mean it, dude! You better let me know you got home safe and didn’t, like, pass out on the train.”

Mishima’s face burns all the way home. Every time he blinks he sees Ryuji’s grin, like it’s etched on the backs of his eyelids. He could swear that grin is even brighter than the sun that shines down harshly on the afternoon.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a conversation with a friend on Tumblr (https://phantom-thieves-official.tumblr.com/post/186432699078/one-word-ryushima)


End file.
